Review copy provided by the publisher.
This is SF horror of a very popular kind. You know all the movies about someone who goes very far out into the solar system and finds something horrible and in fact partly it’s them that’s horrible? And there are incomprehensible alien things and lots of blood and sometimes blood spraying out into vacuum? I wouldn’t be surprised if someone made a movie of this novella, because it is exactly like that, and it is a quite well-done and nasty thing in that direction and they tend to want to look for things like that.
Me personally? I hated it. It is not at all the sort of thing I like, and if it had been longer than a novella I would have stopped reading because my sense of the sunk cost fallacy usually kicks in past novella length. But there’s a difference between hating something and thinking it’s badly done. This is not badly done. Nobody does multilimbed critters like Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s just…someone else’s cup of tea, I feel quite sure. It’s definitely tea and not sludge! It’s just not for me.